Blocking is commonly used in randomized experiments to increase efficiency of estimation. A generalization of blocking removes allocations with imbalance in covariate distributions between treated and control units, and then randomizes within the remaining set of allocations with balance. This idea of rerandomization was formalized by Morgan and Rubin (Annals of Statistics, 2012, 40, 1263–1282), who suggested using Mahalanobis distance between treated and control covariate means as the criterion for removing unbalanced allocations. Kallus (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B: Statistical Methodology, 2018, 80, 85–112) proposed reducing the set of balanced allocations to the minimum. Here we discuss the implication of such an ‘optimal’ rerandomization design for inferences to the units in the sample and to the population from which the units in the sample were randomly drawn. We argue that, in general, it is a bad idea to seek the optimal design for an inference because that inference typically only reflects uncertainty from the random sampling of units, which is usually hypothetical, and not the randomization of units to treatment versus control.

We provide here a framework to analyze the phase transition phenomenon of slice inverse regression (SIR), a supervised dimension reduction technique introduced by \cite{Li:1991}. Under mild conditions, the asymptotic ratio ρ=limp/n is the phase transition parameter and the SIR estimator is consistent if and only if ρ=0. When dimension p is greater than n, we propose a diagonal thresholding screening SIR (DT-SIR) algorithm. This method provides us with an estimate of the eigen-space of the covariance matrix of the conditional expectation var(E[x|y]). The desired dimension reduction space is then obtained by multiplying the inverse of the covariance matrix on the eigen-space. Under certain sparsity assumptions on both the covariance matrix of predictors and the loadings of the directions, we prove the consistency of DT-SIR in estimating the dimension reduction space in high dimensional data analysis. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate superior performances of the proposed method in comparison to its competitors.

This article introduces the large portfolio selection using gross-exposure constraints. It shows that with gross-exposure constraints, the empirically selected optimal portfolios based on estimated covariance matrices have similar performance to the theoretical optimal ones and there is no error accumulation effect from estimation of vast covariance matrices. This gives theoretical justification to the empirical results by Jagannathan and Ma. It also shows that the no-short-sale portfolio can be improved by allowing some short positions. The applications to portfolio selection, tracking, and improvements are also addressed. The utility of our new approach is illustrated by simulation and empirical studies on the 100 FamaFrench industrial portfolios and the 600 stocks randomly selected from Russell 3000.

In statistics and machine learning, we are interested in the eigenvectors (or singular vectors) of certain matrices (eg covariance matrices, data matrices, etc). However, those matrices are usually perturbed by noises or statistical errors, either from random sampling or structural patterns. The Davis-Kahan sin theorem is often used to bound the difference between the eigenvectors of a matrix A and those of a perturbed matrix A= A+ E, in terms of l2 norm. In this paper, we prove that when A is a low-rank and incoherent matrix, the l norm perturbation bound of singular vectors (or eigenvectors in the symmetric case) is smaller by a factor of

Suppose we lhave n observationis ftom Y= X+ c, where e is nieasuremiienit error with kiowin distributioni, and the denesity f of X is uniknowii withi thte nloln-paraniietric conistrainit